Summer's heat is still on, so here's a frosty pick for chilling things up!
Let It Go ~Ari no Mama de~ (Let It Go～ありのままで～) Frozen| Version |  |  |  |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Taiko 3DS 2 | x2 (113) | x2 (165) | x2 (296) | x4 (368) |
| Taiko 0 K, Wii U2, iOS | x2 (111) | x2 (155) | x2 (286) | x4 (361) |
Taiko 0 K, Taiko 3DS 2, Taiko Wii U 2, Taiko iOS
137
none
anayukTaiko 3DS 2 video
Once again, we stumble upon a song from an American animation, but that still fits in Taiko's Anime genre because it's... still animation (even if not Japanese), after Bowling for Soup's Jimmy Neutron Theme for Taiko Drum Master. As the subtitle of the song suggests, today we're dealing with the most popular song from the soundtrack of the 2013 Disney movie Frozen, made by the same team behind most of the most recent computer-animated Disney flicks such as Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph.
The movie is inspired by the 'eventyr' (=fairy-tale in Danish) The Snow Queen, written by Hans Christian Andersen in 1844 for its story collection called New Fairy Tales. First Volume. Second Collection. 1845. Since the early Disney days, Walt Disney himself wanted to feature a huge number of works from the Danish writer for his company's animated movies in some fashion or another, and while some projects managed to come to life in later years with some changes from the original stories (like The Little Mermaid and The Emperor's New Clothes), the development process for a movie based on The Snow Queen turned out to be a really difficult task, as the process of conveying the story and its characters into an animated movie (especially for the Snow Queen herself) was difficult to infuse with that Disney magic. Fresh from the cinematic success of Tangled, the team went on to create a far different interpretation of the original Andersen fairy-tale using stereoscopic 3D animation in spite of the previous hand-drawn projects. In Frozen, a fearless young princess named Anna sets off on an epic journey in order to find her estranged sister Elsa, whose icy powers have inadvertently trapped the kingdom of Arendelle in eternal winter.
Frozen turned out to be Disney's most successful animated movie up to date. With over 1.2 billion dollars in worldwide box office revenue (counting 400 million in USA and 240 million in Japan), Frozen is the highest-grossing film not only for last year, but also the highest-grossing animated movie of all time, and currently the 5th highest-grossing movie overall, right behind blockbuster giants like the last Harry Potter movie, Marvel's The Avengers and Peter Jackson's very own Titanic and Avatar! Awards for the Best Animated Feature were also awarded to the movie's creators from left to right, in the form of Academy, BAFTA and Critics' Choice awards.
The songs for Frozen were written and composed in 2012 by the husband-and-wife songwriting team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, resulting into 8 out of the 25 composed tracks actually making into the movie (with 7 other unused tracks being featured for the movie's deluxe soundtrack CDs). Of course, the one song that really resonated the most with both critics and the public is Let It Go, available in the movie in two different variations: the in-movie song with vocals by Queen Elsa's voice actress and Broadway singer Idina Menzel and a pop-styled cover for the credits roll sung by Disney Channel star Demi Lovato, both of which appear in the soundtrack albums as well. The Menzel version won an additional Academy and Critics' Choice award for Best Original Song in 2013 and peaked at the #5 spot of the Billboards Hot chart (the first for a Tony Award-winning singer/actress), but the media where its popularity has reached its true peak is the Internet, with an incredible number of covers and parodies of any sorts for the song (in fact, so incredible that each letter of the word above redirects to a different Let it Go rendition- it's that huge of an impact!)
The version of Let It Go being used is the one from the Japanese version of the movie, sung by Japanese actress and pop singer/songwriter Takako Matsu (松たか子), being a first in her career to dubbing an animated character. This song is one of the fastest to have changed note patterns between two versions, with roughly half a month between Taiko 3DS 2 and Kimidori Version's launch, resulting into some note removals (and some slight changes to fit the vocals more) in the newer chart for the arcade and a number-play for Oni mode's Max Combo total, as the number 361 in Japanese is read as Cold ('Sa-mu-i'). It's one of the few 4* Oni charts to have copious 1/16 3 note clusters, though most of them are at the end.
